The Best Animated Movies for Adults

Ever since Pixar released the masterful Toy Story on an unsuspecting public, animated films have taken on a new kind of life in the American cinematic landscape. No longer content to be opiates for masses of children worldwide, animated films are lauded for their intelligence and emotional impact—and their impact on parents in particular. There was a time adults wouldn't be caught dead seeing a Disney film without a child in tow, but these days Pixar and their competitors attract adults to evening shows with the promise of subtle humor, clever plotting, and scenes that would make any parent with a soul shed a lake's worth of tears.

It's time we were honest, though. Adults can watch Shrek, or Frozen, or The Incredibles, but great as they are, they're not movies for adults. And while animation for television has been a nurturing home for great adult work like The Simpsons, South Park, Archer, and BoJack Horseman, the same can't quite be said at the movies—at least not here on North American shores.

Great as they are, most animated movies are not for adults.

But the animated movie for adults isn’t a revolutionary idea. Take, for instance, the long history of animated films made exclusively for adults, going all the way back to old pornographic animation of the '20s like Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure or the Betty Boop shorts of the '30s. It wasn’t until the '70s, though, that animated feature films for adults got their place at the table. Since then, while still relatively rare, there have been numerous great examples of what can be done when cartoons are aimed at people over the age of 18.

Sony Pictures Classics

Persepolis

Marjan Satrapi’s adaptation of her own graphic memoir about an Iranian girl coming-of-age through revolutionary times in her home country is a modern animated classic. Its black-and-white style with splashes of color are incredibly memorable, and Persepolis ranks among the best, most empathetic stories about growing up. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

Streamline Pictures

Akira

Akira is the seminal anime classic about future dystopian Neo-Tokyo. As a vision of what’s to come, it hardly gets more inventive than Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s masterpiece. The film also features some truly jaw-dropping animation. Akira is a true epic in both tone and ambition, and since its release in 1988 it has become a standard bearer for anime and for science-fiction storytelling in general. Rent/buy on Amazon.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Pink Floyd: The Wall

A bit of a cheat, perhaps, since it’s not entirely animated, but Alan Parker’s epic adaptation of Pink Floyd’s double-album rock opera The Wall is easily worthy of being on this list. Its surreal live-action sequences blend seamlessly into the totally off-the-wall animated sequences created by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, who would later work on Disney’s Hercules. It’s also a definitively adult film. Sexually charged sequences of flowers penetrating each other, fascist symbolism all over the place, and some of the best music ever recorded—all combined into an amazing, disturbing work of mad genius.

Kino Lorber

Tower

This animated documentary finds precedence in Waltz with Bashir (also on this list), but where that film used animation to recreate events with a dream-like tinge, Tower uses to power of animation to put its viewers in the perceptive reality of terror. The film tells the story of the sniper massacre at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966. It’s a harrowing film, to be sure, but one that gives perhaps the truest sense of what being caught in the middle of a mass shooting must feel like, and more necessary now than ever. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

Studio Ghibli

Grave of the Fireflies

Not exactly your typical Studio Ghibli film, Isao Takahata's film is about a brother and sister surviving the final months of WWII. Though it may be about children, Grave of the Fireflies is not at all for kids. In fact, it’s a difficult watch even for adults, and especially for parents. As a presentation of the real effects of war, Takahata leverages the expressionist qualities of animation for one of the most powerfully devastating films ever made. Rent/buy on iTunes.

Gkids

Sita Sings the Blues

Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues is a unique film for many reasons. First and foremost is the fact that the film’s complicated music rights led its director to distribute the film for free online. Then there’s the fact that Paley created and animated the film almost entirely on her own using Flash. Then there’s the style, which combines scenes from Paley’s own life with tales from the Indian epic poem the Ramayana and visuals inspired by Indian shadow puppetry. All that, plus music from 1930s jazz star Annette Hanshaw. Rent/buy on Amazon.

Cinemation Industries

Fritz the Cat

Ralph Bakshi is the father of modern American adult animation, and Fritz the Cat, his 1972 feature film debut, was a subversive, crude success. Based on the character created by Robert Crumb, and standing in stark contrast to Disney-dominated world of animation, both visually and content-wise, Fritz the Cat laid claim to the untapped potential of having an anthropomorphic cat explore free love, drugs, and radical politics. While it doesn't completely hold up, it's a great example of the melding of '70s exploitation filmmaking with the open possibilities provided by animation. Rent/buy on Amazon.

New World Pictures

Fantastic Planet

The 1973 French film Fantastic Planet, about humans living on a planet of giants who consider them animals, is one of the great science fiction films of all time—made all the better by its distinctive visual style, created with stop-motion cutout animation. Themes of genocide and racism are handled with surreal aplomb, and the film as been enthralling cult (see: drug-fueled) audiences for decades now. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

Warner Bros.

Watership Down

Some will tell you Watership Down is a family film. Don't believe them. Sure, you can show it to a child…if you want to scar them for life. Though it's an adventure story about animals and doesn't feature any "objectionable" content, Watership Down is an adult film through and through. It's a devastating, highly nuanced film about war and societal conflict, and well worth revisiting if all you remember about it is how much it made you cry as a kid. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Waking Life

Richard Linklater is no stranger to experimentation with animation. He's directed two rotoscoped animated films, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. Both a great, but it's the former that has stuck around as a cult favorite. In essence a series of philosophical conversations about the blurred line between dream and reality, Waking Life uses its unique animation to visually present its thematic exploration. (And it features a scene in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy revisit their Before Sunrise characters, Jesse and Céline.) Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

20th Century Fox

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Fantastic Mr. Fox is closest thing to a family film on this list, but I'd strongly argue that it's more properly called an adult film that kids can watch, too. They'll probably enjoy the beautiful stop-motion animation and silly antics. The movie is based on Roald Dahl's children's novel, of course, but director Wes Anderson adapted it into somebody much deeper, about flailing masculinity and the wide reaching effects of self-destructive behavior. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

Palm Pictures

Ghost in the Shell

One of the great anime films of all time that tackles wild science fiction, political conspiracy, awesome action, and sexual exploration, Ghost in the Shell is perhaps the prototypical anime feature, and for a reason: it's great. It's highly influential, too, on modern science fiction, particularly on the work of the Wachowskis. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

Paramount Pictures

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

What more is there to say about South Park? Trey Parker and Matt Stone's creation is crude as hell, and funnier still. The film version—a raucous satire of its own existence—is one of the funniest films of the last 20 years, one of the best movie musicals of all time, and filled to the brim with swearing, nudity, and some of the more incisive cultural and political commentary of the late '90s. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

Sony Pictures Classics

Waltz With Bashir

Ari Folman's documentary about his experiences fighting in the Israeli military during the 1982 Lebanon War stunned audiences with a new vision of what the medium could do. Documentaries long strode the line between fact and fiction, but Waltz with Bashir completely changed the game. Using rotoscoped animation to recreate lost memories, Folman blends reality and surrealist elements to paint a vision of war unlike anything else in cinematic history. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

Gkids

Chico & Rita

Chico & Rita is a charming, beautiful film about a piano player and a singer whose lives through the '40s and '50s take them through the full range of romance and heartache. The two find themselves confronting racism, drug dealing, and Castro's Cuba. Their world is brought to life in gorgeous, clean, evocative animation, making the highs high and the tragic lows hit that much harder. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

Manga Entertainment

Perfect Blue

Satoshi Kon was taken from the world far too soon, but while he was here he managed to gift us with a number of stunning animated features. Paprika, Millennium Actress, and Tokyo Godfathers are all amazing works, but for my money Perfect Blue is Japanese animation at its very best. The film, about a singer who decides to become an actress and slowly descends into the dark, surreal world of her own ambitions, was practically remade by Darren Aronofsky with Black Swan—but it's so much more. Incredible animation and a truly terrifying psychodrama play out, searing images into your mind like few other thrillers ever have.

Cinemad Presents

It's Such a Beautiful Day

Don Hertzfeld's incredible first feature film—actually comprised of three collected short films—is experimental animation at its finest. Completely personal in its visual style—drawn with stick figures and line animation—and even more personal in its absurd exploration of depression, loneliness, and death, It's Such a Beautiful Day is animation as essay in the best possible way. It's the kind of film that will make your heart stop and the beat back to life, putting you through the wringer until you've come out the other side just a little bit closer to understanding the meaning of life. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

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